Folding crop headers are employed in vehicular harvesting machines such as combine harvesters, forage harvesters and various forms of vegetable harvester.
Typically a header includes an in-use horizontally extending platform sometimes called a cutter bar supporting forwardly projecting comb teeth or other crop cutting features. In the case of a conventional grain harvesting machine an elongate, horizontally extending, rotating reel supporting metal or plastic knife blades co-acts with the features of the cutter bar as the harvesting machine advances in a field of crop. This action severs the crop stems and helps convey them inside the harvesting machine for threshing or other separation of valuable crop parts from stems and husks. In other harvesting machines the forwardly projecting features can be powered to rotate or otherwise reciprocate in order to cut crop plants as the harvesting machine moves forwardly.
At either end of the cutter bar the header includes a respective, forwardly projecting crop divider. The crop dividers are triangular plates forwardly projecting apices of which penetrate the rows of crop at either end of the cutter bar as the harvesting machine moves forwardly. The main purpose of the crop dividers is to ensure that crop over the whole width of the cutter bar is captured during harvesting, and there is no wastage caused by crop being pushed sideways away from the cutter bar.
The crop dividers are rigid or only partially flexible and present a potential hazard when the harvesting machines are driven on roads. Moreover in several countries vehicle homologation regulations dictate that items such as crop dividers must project forwardly relative to the steering wheel of a harvester by no more than a defined maximum distance. The crop dividers when in situ may breach this requirement.
In the early days of combine harvester development the crop divider was completely rigid but this led to damage when the crop divider struck e.g. an undulation in the ground.
In order to solve such defects a modern crop divider is partly flexible, and includes a horizontal pivot, defined at a lower edge of the crop divider, that allows pivoting of a front section of the crop divider upwardly relative to the remainder that is fixed to the cutter bar. This permits the crop divider to flex and accommodate undulations. Also the ability of the crop divider to pivot has a beneficial effect on crop flow especially in lodged grain conditions as from time to time arise.
In known combine harvester designs the range of pivoting movement is limited, at least while the header is in use during harvesting operations. Moreover this limited ability to flex does not address the problem, identified above, of the crop divider protruding forwardly further than is allowed in on-road driving situations.
It is an aim of the invention to solve or at least ameliorate one or more problems of the prior art.